How to choose between common A vs B options—using decision briefs that show who each product fits, what breaks first, and where pricing changes behavior.
If you only have 2 minutes, do this sequence. It’s designed to get you to a confident default choice quickly, then validate it with the few checks that actually decide fit.
Start with your non‑negotiables (latency model, limits, compliance boundary, or operational control).
Pick two candidates that target the same abstraction level (so the comparison is apples-to-apples).
Validate cost behavior at scale: where do the price cliffs appear (traffic spikes, storage, egress, seats, invocations)?
Confirm the first failure mode you can’t tolerate (timeouts, rate limits, cold starts, vendor lock‑in, missing integrations).
Edge latency vs regional ecosystem depth: Edge runtimes win on user-perceived latency and request-path compute, but come with tighter execution constraints and different state/networking patterns. Regional clouds offer broad integrations and event ecosystems, but add latency and can hide cold-start and concurrency cliffs until scale.
Cold starts, concurrency, and execution ceilings: Most serverless failures aren’t outages—they’re invisible limits: cold start latency, throttling, timeouts, and memory/CPU coupling. A platform that looks fine in dev can degrade under bursts or long-tail traffic when concurrency and warm capacity assumptions break.
Pricing physics and cost cliffs: Serverless pricing is often “pay per use,” but cost cliffs appear with sustained traffic, chatty APIs, and egress-heavy workloads. Requests, duration, memory allocation, and networking/egress can dominate costs. The winning choice depends on workload shape and how predictable usage is.
This is an editorial collection page. Each link below goes to a decision brief that explains why the pair is comparable, where the trade‑offs show up under real usage, and what tends to break first when you push the product past its “happy path.”
It is not a feature checklist and it is not a “best tools” ranking. If you’re early in your search, start at the category page first; if you already have 2 candidates, this hub is the fastest path to a confident default choice.
Pick AWS Lambda if your stack is AWS-first and you want mature event triggers and integrations as the default. Pick Azure Functions if your org is Azure-first and governance/identity alignment is the constraint. In both cases, what breaks first is usually cold starts, concurrency ceilings, and cost cliffs—not availability.
Pick Cloudflare Workers when your compute is on the request path and you need a global latency model (middleware, routing, personalization) and can design within edge constraints. Pick Vercel Functions when your backend is primarily app-adjacent endpoints and your constraint is a cohesive deploy workflow—then validate limits and cost behavior as traffic becomes sustained. The decision is execution model (edge vs regional) and constraints, not feature checklists.
Pick AWS Lambda when your data and event topology are already AWS-first and integrations reduce plumbing. Pick Google Cloud Functions when you’re GCP-first and want a simple trigger-driven function baseline. Both fail first on constraints: cold starts, timeouts, scaling ceilings, and cost cliffs under sustained traffic.
Pick Vercel Functions when your app is framework-centric (especially Next.js) and you want the tightest DX loop. Pick Netlify Functions when you want a web-platform functions layer for sites and lightweight backends. In both cases, what breaks first is usually limits and cost behavior as traffic becomes sustained.
Pick Cloudflare Workers when you want a broadly adopted edge runtime for request-path compute and middleware-style workloads. Pick Fastly Compute when your use case is performance-sensitive edge programmability and you want workflow fit for networking-adjacent patterns. Both succeed or fail based on how well you design within edge constraints (state, limits, observability).
Pick AWS Lambda when the value is ecosystem depth: managed triggers, integrations, and regional cloud patterns for event-driven systems. Pick Cloudflare Workers when the value is edge latency: request-path compute close to users and middleware-style logic. The most important constraint is execution model—edge vs region—and what becomes visible under load (cold starts, ceilings, cost cliffs).
Pricing and availability may change. Verify details on the official website.